Other researchers’ work

Here you will find work from other researchers who use the World Management Survey. If you have a paper you think should be here, please send it to us and we can add it to this page.

Manufacturing papers

The Brain Gain of Corporate Boards: Evidence from China

M Giannetti, G Liao and X Yu, 2015Published in Journal of Finance

We study the impact of directors with foreign experience on firm performance in
emerging markets. Using a unique data set from China, we exploit the introduction
of policies to attract talented emigrants and increase the supply of individuals with foreign experience in different provinces at different times. We document that performance increases after firms hire directors with foreign experience and identify the channels through which the emigration of talent may lead to a brain gain. Our findings provide evidence on how directors transmit knowledge about management practices and corporate governance to firms in emerging markets.

The large regional variation of minimum wage changes in 2002—08 implies that Chinese manufacturing firms experienced competitive shocks as a function of firm location and their low-wage employment share. We find that minimum wage hikes accelerate the input substitution from labor to capital in low-wage firms, reduce employment growth, but also accelerate total factor productivity growth–particularly among the less productive firms under private Chinese or foreign ownership, but not among state-owned enterprises. The heterogeneous firm response to labor cost shocks can be explained by differences in governance or management practice, but is difficult to reconcile with the idea that competitive pressure is a substitute for governance quality.

This paper examines whether and, if so, why source country heterogeneity exists in foreign direct investment (FDI). Using detailed data on all Swedish firms for the period from 1996 to 2009, we find statistical evidence that affiliate performance differs systematically across source countries. For instance, affiliates of US multinational enterprises (MNEs) are, on average, approximately three times more productive than affiliates headquartered in the Nordic countries. One possible explanation for these discrepancies is differences in organization practices across source countries. Using new firm-level data from the World Management Survey to estimate a global index of the quality of management practices for MNEs with headquarters in our source countries of interest, we find that source country heterogeneity in affiliate performance is highly correlated with differences in management practices.

This paper proposes a model of production where technical change is both time and management induced. The authors define a general management index in addition to the general time index of Baltagi and Griffin (1988) and use them as arguments in the translog production function. Time and management induced technical change are then defined in terms of these general indices. For comparison, the authors also consider models in which time and management are specified as continuous variables. We report empirical results for a sample of manufacturing firms in the US, UK, Germany and France.

This report, commissioned by the Ministry of Economic Development (MED) and undertaken by Professor Roy Green and Dr. Renu Agarwal from University of Technology Sydney, benchmarks management practices in New Zealand manufacturing firms against other countries.

This report, commissioned by the Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (DIISR) and undertaken by Professor Roy Green and Dr. Renu Agarwal from University of Technology Sydney, benchmarks management practices in Australia manufacturing firms against other countries.

Department of Enterprise Trade and Investment, InvestNI, the Department for Employment and Learning, Intertrade Ireland, Forfas and the Management Development Council, 2009

This report, commissioned by the Department of Enterprise Trade and Investment, InvestNI, the Department for Employment and Learning, Intertrade Ireland, Forfas and the Management Development Council, looks at management practices in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland and compare managerial skills in manufacturing firms with those in Great Britain and other countries.

Do Management Practices Affect the Economic Performance of Firms Located in Southeast Wisconsin, USA

Gary F. Keller, 2009

Historically, businesses in southeast Wisconsin enjoyed decades of prosperity when the region was a manufacturing center from approximately the 1880s to the early 2000s. Since the late 1980s the area’s economy has been plagued with high unemployment due to the loss of many manufacturing companies. The purpose of this quantitative study was to determine whether a firm’s management practices were related to its economic performance defined as increases/decreases in the number of employees. A review of the relevant peerreviewed, scholarly and industry related literature concerning management practices and their affect on the performance of businesses was conducted. The outcome of the literature review demonstrated that management practices have a direct impact on firm performance. The literature was replete in demarcating management theory and financial measurements. However, few if any scholars have been able to demonstrate a connection between the two elements due to the inability to a reliable methodology to connect the most vital management practices to economic performance. As a consequence, economists, financial analysts and accountants have utilized the most reliable and acceptable measures available, fiscal ratios, balance sheets and etc. However, Bloom and Van Reenen (2007) provided a methodology and survey tool to illuminate the correlation between management decisions and firm economic performance. The author of this study composed a survey composed of 15 general firm identifier questions and 18 management practices defined by Bloom and Van Reenen (2007) as operations, monitoring, targets and incentives and sent it to the chief executive officers of all 682 qualified for-profit manufacturing and service firms in southeast Wisconsin. Upon analysis of the survey data, it was determined that each of the four null hypotheses in this study could not be rejected. However, an examination of the survey data based upon firm ownership type demonstrated that management practices had a significant effect on the economic performance of family owned and operated firms as well as privately owned firms in southeast Wisconsin at the .007 level of significance.

This paper focus on management practices in not-for-profits and examine how they compare with for-profits in the same industry. Findings suggest that not-for-profits have worse management practices but performance as well as for-profits in terms of productivity and quality.

This paper describes the variation in management practices among a large sample of 597 hospital cardiac care units, assesses the association of these practices with processes of care, readmissions, and mortality for patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI), and suggests specific directions for the testing and dissemination of health care management approaches.

This paper looks at management measures from interviews of physicians and managers in around 150 drug and alcohol addiction treatment centres in the US. It finds a significant association between better management practices and days to treatment admission.

Using a tried and tested measure of management practices which has been shown to predict firm performance, we survey nearly 250 departments across 100+ UK universities. We find large differences in management scores across universities and that departments in older, researchintensive universities score higher than departments in newer, more teaching-oriented universities. We also find that management matters in universities. The scores, particularly with respect to provision of incentives for staff recruitment, retention and promotion, are correlated with both teaching and research performance conditional on resources and past performance. Moreover, this relationship holds for all universities, not just research-intensive ones.

Management of Bureaucrats and Public Service Delivery: Evidence from the Nigerian Civil Service

Imran Rasul, Daniel Rogger, 2013

We study how the management practices bureaucrats operate under relate to the quantity and quality of public services delivered. We do so exploiting data from the Nigerian Civil Service. For 4700 public sector projects, we have hand-coded independent engineering assessments of project completion rates and delivered quality. We supplement this with a survey eliciting management practices for bureaucrats in the 63 civil service organizations responsible for these projects, building on Bloom and Van Reenen [2007]. Management practices matter: a one standard deviation increase in bureaucrat’s autonomy signi…cantly increases project completion rates by 18%; a one standard deviation increase in practices related to incentives/monitoring of bureaucrats signi…cantly lowers project completion rates by 14%. We show the negative impacts of incentive provision/monitoring arise because bureaucrats multi-task and incentives are poorly targeted, and because these management practices capture elements of subjective performance evaluation that leave scope for dysfunctional responses from bureaucrats. To support a causal interpretation of our …ndings, we document the determinants of management practices and examine channels through which organizations might endogenously adjust management practices. Our results provide novel insights into how changes in how bureaucrats are managed can have potentially large impacts on public service delivery in a developing country context

WORLD MANAGEMENT SURVEY

The World Management Survey is the first cross-country, cross-industry dataset built to measure the quality of management practices in establishments. Our vision is to continue to expand the dataset using the rigour and care that goes into creating high-quality data. Most importantly, our vision is to have as many researchers as possible working with this data.